Why have you turned #! into a server distro????
Debian Stable is the server version… (to be compared with centos)
Debian Testing however is the desktop version of Debian!
Please do yourself a favor and add “Testing” images back.. that way as many users wount leave you as they do now, and some might even move back!

Normally I would be happy to ignore such a comment, (it obviously came from a misguided person, or troll) however, it did get me thinking about how fantastic a release Debian Squeeze has been.

I have been using Squeeze, in one guise or another, on desktops and servers, for well over 18 months and it has been an absolute joy to use (I say “joy”, but to be honest, I am not sure that “joy” is the correct term. What is the correct term for something that stays out of the way and just works?)

I am so glad I made the decision to switch from using Ubuntu when I did. This last 18 months of using Debian has not only provided me with a solid OS on which to build, but it has also given me a better understanding of the advantages of using a release for more than 6 months at a time; something I am sure I would never have been able to achieve as an Ubuntu user. Now, before I get slated, I should point out that I am well aware that Ubuntu do provide a long term support release, but the thing is, as an Ubuntu user I always found the temptation to upgrade too much to resist (I point the finger of blame directly at the Ubuntu hype machine, not at my infallible self) :P

Anyhow, while I am looking forward to playing around with Debian Wheezy, the current Debian testing branch, I can foresee Squeeze and my #! Statler builds remaining on a couple of my boxes for a good while yet. IMHO, the release still has plenty of legs left in it, even if some people consider it only fit for servers. Troglodytes!

BTW, I updated the Statler images today :)

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Tagged: crunchbang linux, debian

So, when I read that the Hacker Public Radio crew were planning on holding a special 12 hour LIVE New Year’s Eve event, I danced with joy (well, not quite, but I was pretty excited.) I mean, what better way to celebrate the New Year than by joining some like-minded geeks for an open round-table discussion?

So, both Becky and I joined the event for a few hours and we spent our night chatting about all manner of things. Topics included some chatter about CrunchBang, mesh networks, drugs and naughty stuff, as well as other random subjects.

It was a fun event and I just wanted thank everybody involved for allowing Becky and I to be a part of it. It was definitely the geekiest New Year’s Eve that I have ever experienced and I really hope it becomes a regular event!

P.S. If you missed the event, but would like to listen to the discussions, the whole 12 hour show is being made available from the HPR site.

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Tagged: crunchbang linux, hacker public radio, hpr

Wanted to tell you that after using linux as a desktop & server for 12+ years, I never found a linux distro that I liked for the packages, the stability & the aesthetics all at once. At most got two out of three. Until I found #! - I can’t tell you what an eerie yet delightful experience it was when I first started it up & found everything just so.

I hope to see you continue with this distro, while the donation is a tiny pittance, I hope to do more as time goes on & send like-minded folks along to try #!. I think there are many of us who are like me somewhat technical, yet have a sense of aesthetics and efficiency that recoils at either “bling” loaded desktops or worflow-interrupting instability.

My sincere esteem to you sir for making a Good Thing.

Now, I do not seek out affirmation that CrunchBang is a worthwhile project, but now-and-again it is nice to hear from people who seem to “get it”.

P.S. if anyone is reading this, I wish you a Happy New Year and I hope 2012 sends many good things your way! :)

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Tagged: crunchbang linux

Interestingly, or not, during the interview, I can be heard talking about dropping Openbox from CrunchBang, in favour of using Xfce. As it turns out, I ended up dropping Xfce. Yes, it is true, I am a walking contradiction.

But enough about me and my flip flops, back to HPR and Ken Fallon. During OggCamp, I was fortunate enough to stay at the same hotel as Ken, and even more fortunate to share a breakfast table with him (Ken is truly is one of the most friendly, intelligent and witty people you could wish to meet) where we discussed, over bacon and eggs, HPR and his involvement with the project.

Now, before talking with Ken, I knew that HPR existed, but I did not really have much of a clue as to what it was all about. It only took Ken a few minutes to convince me to look into some more and I have been an avid listener since (admittedly, I do not find all the episodes to be of interest, but once in a while, you come across a true gem).

Ken does fantastic work with HPR and I think he was probably the most enthusiastic and dedicated person that I met during OggCamp. While most people seemed to be socialising and recovering from the previous night’s beer intake (myself included), Ken managed to set-up and man the HPR stall (on both days), interviewed countless people for HPR, and even managed to find the time to give a presentation about the project (which was really well received!) That weekend, Ken’s dedication to his project was almost superhuman and in my eyes, the guy is a total legend!

So, if you are not familiar with it, check out Hacker Public Radio, and if you can, please give some thought about how you might be able to help Ken out and contribute a show — if you have a working knowledge of anything, from hacking with GNU Emacs, to hacking your backyard with chickens, you are eligible to contribute!

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Tagged: crunchbang linux, hacker public radio, hpr, oggcamp

In many ways, the new images are not really about additional features, but more about what has been removed and/or cleaned up (although there are a few new features to look forward to).

I guess the main thing to have been removed/retired is the Xfce version. I love Xfce and I thought about this long and hard, but I really want to concentrate on making CrunchBang give the best possible out-of-the-box Openbox experience possible. Besides, there are plenty of brilliant Xfce based distributions available, and if you know what you are doing, installing Xfce under Debian is really not too difficult.

GDM is the other big loser, being replaced by SLiM. This is something which should probably have happened a long time ago. Traditionally, I have always used GDM and for the most part, it just worked, but in comparison to SLiM, it is a bit of a beast. Also, while I was content with using the legacy GDM packages, I do not think that GDM3 is something I would like to see included with CrunchBang, and so the move to SLiM seemed obvious. I know that other display/login managers are available, but SLiM seems to do the job nicely at the moment. Moving to SLiM has also meant that I needed to make some changes to CrunchBang’s custom logout/shutdown/reboot script, which now relies on HAL. This may, or may not prove problematic at some point in the future, but for Squeeze based systems, it should be fine.

Plymouth, the graphical boot loader, has also gone from the default install. The decision to remove it was really a personal preference. I apologise to any bling lovers, but personally, I believe that graphical boot loaders take away more than they give. Also, CrunchBang is not really an exercise in branding and so removing a flashing logo is not a problem at all.

Other changes include:

• Openbox 3.5 — the latest and greatest release. You might want to check the changelog on the Openbox website as a number of significant changes have been made.

• Iceweasel/Firefox 8 replaces Chromium 9 — CrunchBang seems to switch back-and-forth between default browsers, probably like a lot of users do. I do not think this is problem, but merely reflects the state of browser development and availability at the time. Having said that Firefox seems to be getting better with each release and the mozilla.debian.net team are doing a fantastic job of keeping up with the new release schedule. So, I have mirrored the mozilla.debian.net repository and will keep it in sync. Also, for any Google Chrome and/or Opera users, there is a new Openbox pipemenu for installing these browsers with minimal effort, and a menu item for setting the system’s default x-www-browser.

• Geany replaces gedit — I spend much of my day in my editor and until a few months ago that editor had always been gedit. Then someone suggested I take a look at Geany, so I did and it won me over. Geany is a fantastic editor, is highly configurable, has lots of great plugins and maybe just as importantly, is DE independent.

• Gigolo and Thunar for managing connections to remote filesystems — in the past, some reviewers have mentioned the fact that there has not been an easy way to mount and browse remote filesystems through the default file manager. I have addressed this by including Gigolo and configuring it to work out-of-the-box with Thunar. It is now super simple to connect to remote filesystems via SSH, Samba etc.

• Improved D-I preseeding — all packages related to the LiveCD are now completely purged during the installation process, resulting in a much cleaner system.

• Linux kernel 2.6.39 replaces 2.6.32 — this is the kernel from the Debian backports repository. Debian backports are enabled by default.

• LibreOffice replaces OpenOffice.org — actually, CrunchBang ships with AbiWord and Gnumeric, but many people choose to install a more feature rich office suite via the CrunchBang post installation script. The script has been changed to suggest LibreOffice.

• New repository locations — as part of my ongoing work to move domains from crunchbanglinux.org to crunchbang.org, the repositories for these builds have been moved. Also, a new website is being constructed, but is very much a work in progress. Apologies if this causes any inconvenience or confusion to anyone. I will write more about this at some point in the future.

• Many more minor and cosmetic changes.

A note to any existing Statler users: if you are happy with your current installation, I would suggest keeping it. However, if you are interested in using the new images, I would recommend backing up your data and performing a clean install. Ultimately, for reasons which I hope are obvious after reading this post, a clean install will take less time and will result in a cleaner system than if you try to bring your existing installation in line with the new Statler repositories. Apologies again if this causes any inconvenience, but in the long run, I hope it will be worth it.

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Tagged: crunchbang linux, debian, openbox

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Tagged: crunchbang, life

We had a great time recording the show. We ended up chatting for a good couple of hours and we discussed all sorts of nonsense, including Linux, trees, black holes, Ubuntu/Unity, CoCs, LUGs and much more.

If you are interested in listening, you can grab the podcast here. I hope others enjoy it as much as we enjoyed recording it.

P.S. The podcast could be considered NSFW.

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Tagged: podcasts, tdtrs

**sad face**

So, why have I been so busy? Well, mainly because I have taken a new position as a PHP developer.

**happy face**

I am now working for small local business, developing some interesting projects with great potential. There are just three developers in the office and it feels great to be working within a small team. I am really enjoying it and loving the challenge.

As part of my new position, I have been working with CodeIgniter, a rather nifty PHP framework. Now, I have always steered well clear of frameworks for my own projects, but I have to admit that CodeIgniter is really quite nice. It has some fantastic libraries and helpers, yet manages to stay quite lean and lightweight. At some point in the future, I may take a look at rewriting some of my own little projects to take advantage of some of its features.

WordPress is something else that has been taking up a fair amount of my time, which is quite surprising as I kind of lost interest in it a good few years ago. Anyhow, I wanted to take another look at it in more depth as I have been thinking about using it for a potential project; so, I took a look, and I am still looking; interestingly, or not, I get the impression that once you strip away much of the crufty (subjective) features/functions/widgets etc, it is pretty much the same old WordPress that it used to be. I wonder why I have perceived it to be anything else?

Finally, there is Ubuntu and Unity. Now, I installed Ubuntu Natty with Unity a good few weeks ago, and surprisingly, it is still on my system. I thought I might have been slightly premature in declaring my love for Unity last month, but as it turns out, the more I use it, the more I like it. It really is a pleasure. Sure, there are a few little bugs here and there, but for the most part, it just works. And I’ll be honest, after a good few years of wrangling with putting CrunchBang together, a vanilla Ubuntu install with Unity comes as a bit of a relief — please, do not flame me for saying that.

Talking of CrunchBang, I am currently on hiatus from the project. I do feel kind of guilty for not being able to spend time working on it, but sometimes, real life and other interests have to take priority.

Oh, wait second, I nearly forgot to mention my conversion from Bazaar to Git. Yes I have seen the light, finally!

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Tagged: bazaar, codeigniter, crunchbang linux, git, php, ubuntu, unity, work

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Tagged: ubuntu, unity

Having been thoroughly impressed by the FluxBB website, I spent some time over the last couple of nights playing around with the FluxBB codebase, trying to familiarise myself with how it works. While I was experimenting with it, I wrote a couple of simple modifications for the user registrations system. I submitted the mods to the FluxBB mods repository and they got accepted. I am not sure they will be overly useful to most FluxBB administrators, but I have been looking at how it is possible to integrate the forums into services running on the host machine and I thought the modifications would come in handy.

The first mod adds a list of reserved usernames, which is used to validate the usernames of new registrations. I thought this would be useful to stop users from registering names such as ‘root’, ‘administrator’, ‘www-data’ etc. See FluxBB reserved usernames for more details.

The second mod tries to ensure users only register names that are safe to integrate into system services, such as mail servers. See FluxBB safe usernames for more details.

In totally unrelated news, there is something really rather exciting happening in Lincoln, UK. I cannot divulge any details at the moment, other than that I am really hoping to be a part of it. Exciting times ahead, possibly. :)

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Tagged: fluxbb, php